I wish I could forget Daniel. Or no—not forget him; I never want to forget him. But I wish he could loosen his grip on me or that my heart could—finally—expand to make room for someone else. I wish I could banish the weary, bone-deep aching that settles into me at the thought of replacing him. I wish I could alter the clichéd dream I still have with regularity; in it I’m running along a rutted road, desperate, my breath hitching, trying to get back to Daniel before his eyes close forever and he’s gone.

I never make it.

“Have a blast in Barcelona,” said Declan. His hands slid around my waist; his breath, warm and spicy like cinnamon, brushed my neck. I thought he might kiss me, and I closed my eyes.

“Well,” said Declan, releasing my waist after a final reassuring squeeze. “We’ll miss you, but I look forward to meeting your friends in a few days. And don’t worry about the kids, Kiki. It’s going to be the perfect weekend.”

5

A Homesteader’s Guide to Going Off the Grid

COMPTON

NEW YORK CITY

Just before she departed for Spain, Compton Winfield blundered into a secret her husband had been keeping from her. To her knowledge, throughout the entire history of their marriage, Ellis had been an open book; gregarious by nature, he was unable to keep anything of interest to himself. Or so she’d thought; unlike her, he could fairly be described as an oversharer. So it was even more startling to realize he’d been harboring a hidden desire to leave their lives behind.

Her last day in New York had imploded, beginning with an eight-hour ED shift that metastasized into a twelve-hour shift when her last patient of the day, a forty-eight-year-old executive, had coded and almost died right as she was completing the order to discharge him. Every component of that sentence was bad: it was bad that her last patient was so complex, especially when she was in a hurry; it was bad that he coded right as she’d been preparing to discharge him; and it was beyond bad that he, a youngish man, had coded at all.

So much badness to unpack there.

Depending on how you regarded it, Compton had been either blessed or cursed by whatever fickle genies control the fates. If the patient had arrived at the ED later, someone else would have seen him. On the other hand, if his inexplicable crash had occurred later, he’d have already departed the ER and died on the street, and her career would have been condemned to suffer a slow, agonizing death of its own. Not that she presumed to compare the loss of a career to the loss of a life, but she’d run a hundred agonized replays in her mind and still could not determine what, if anything, she’d done wrong.